Summary

Although a relatively new technology, topic maps are already finding a number of practical uses in both information publication, and application development and integration. Some of the benefits of using topic maps, as expressed by respondents to the research for this paper, include:

• Expressive data structure - makes it easy to represent the structure of the information in the problem domain.

• Intuitive model - Both developers and users find the concept-centric approach to structuring information to be a natural one. For developers this makes the data design portion of the application simpler. For users it can make navigation and searching operations more effective.

• Data-driven, flexible schema - Both the data and the schema information for the data are kept in the same information structure. Because the schema is data driven and not the result of a compilation process (as is the case with RDBMS tables), the schema can be refined or radically altered at run-time.

• Simple serialized format - XTM is sufficiently simple that it can be readily processed with XSLT, either for publishing a topic map to a set of HTML pages for browsing; or for generating topic maps from other sources of XML-based meta data.

• Explicit rules for combination - Topic maps are designed to be merged - enabling sharing of information structures not only between businesses but between information systems. Thus, topic maps can be used as an effective information systems integration technology.

• Implementations available - engine, creation, editing and publishing applications are all available as either commercial or non-commercial applications. For a systems integrator or application developer, this provides the ability to begin working at the "high level" with the information structures themselves rather than having to get involved with the implementation of serialization or parsing for example.

As with any new technology, it can be difficult to make the initial business case for applying topic maps, it is to be hoped that some of the case-studies provided here show that an initial investment can quickly deliver a return on investment and, more importantly, open up new technical avenues for the creation of additional business value.